Studio: international art (58.1913)

Studio- Talk

"Middlesex hayricks" (etching) (Messrs. Colnaghi and Obach)

Berthe Morisot to be remembered—but certain it
is, that the best work in the recent show was to be
found in painting direct from nature. Recalling
some of the pictures which asserted individuality
we must mention A Bunch of Flowers and Stocks,
by M. E. Atkins; On the Verandah, by Ethel
Walker; Un Quai Breton, by A. M. Fox;
Carcassonne, by I. A. Dods-Withers; The Room
with a Top Light, by E. Q. Henriques; The
Palace Fontainebleau, by E. A. Jardine; Portrait
of a Girl in a Fur Hat, by E. A. Hope; Across the
Brooks, by Gabell Smith; Reading aloud, by
Mabel Layng; Minnie, by Renee Finch; The
White House, by Maud J. Button; Romeo and
Juliet, by Agatha Hall; Anemones, by Ruth
Hbllingsworth; A Colour Sketch, by Louise Pickard;
Marie Claire, by M. R. Lousada, and The Wishing
Pool, by Jessie M. King.

Mr. William P. Robins, who has just been
elected an Associate of the Royal Society of
Painter-etchers and Engravers, learned his craft
under Sir Frank Short, whose masterly teaching is
eloquent in the soundness and sincerity of his
work, of which we reproduce three examples.
No one with a true appreciation of landscape will

by william p. robins, a.r.e.

fail to recognise in the quiet simple beauty of his
dry-point, The Canal, a vision at once imaginative
and individual, and it promises well for the young
artist's future that he should have produced such a
plate so early in his career. It was a dry-point en-
titled The Old Barn that secured his election, but
he works quite as happily with the acid, as the
sunny plate called Middlesex Hayricks testifies.
Trees assert their pictorial significance in all his
prints, and their presence therein is the outcome
of a genuine love for them and a familiarity with
their individualities acquired by living in their
midst. Mr. Robins has proved himself an accom-
plished exponent of aquatint in such prints as the
Headley Downs, here reproduced, and the Norfolk
La?idscape, which represented his work in this
medium in Messrs. Colnaghi and Obach's recent
exhibition of etchings and drawings.

The exhibition of the Societe Internationale de la
Peinture a l'Eau at the Fine Art Society's Galleries
in March, seemed to prove that it is still with the
English, at any rate the Anglo-Saxon, that the
instinctive understanding of pure water-colour lies.
It was Mr. J. S. Sargent whose work was in this
exhibition most eloquent of the resources of water-

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